Book

This book analyzes numerous student translation projects—hundreds of pages containing countless errors—across three academic years: before the pandemic, during the emergency shift to e-learning, and after targeted interventions were introduced. The finding is striking. When students moved from blended learning to full e-learning, errors more than doubled. Wordiness increased. Tense errors multiplied. Polysemy confusion, idiom literalism, and antonym reversal became alarmingly common. Targeted interventions—virtual office hours, error-specific handouts, peer review pairs, and back-translation exercises—reduced errors substantially. But a significant gap remained above the pre-pandemic baseline. Through systematic analysis of dozens of error types—grammatical, stylistic, and semantic—this book reveals what e-learning can and cannot achieve in translation pedagogy. Grammatical errors proved most responsive to increased feedback. Semantic errors proved most resistant, requiring the kind of dialogic negotiation of meaning that asynchronous written feedback alone cannot provide. The verdict? E-learning can be improved through deliberate, well-designed interventions. But it cannot fully replace face-to-face interaction. Blended learning—the thoughtful integration of online and in-person components—remains the gold standard for translator training. Essential reading for translation educators, e-learning designers, quality assurance professionals, and higher education policymakers.